This chapter looks at the new economy of diasporic imagination that hit South Africa after 1994. It begins by examining a range of narratives of roots tourism whereby thousands of South African ...
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This chapter looks at the new economy of diasporic imagination that hit South Africa after 1994. It begins by examining a range of narratives of roots tourism whereby thousands of South African Indians each year travel to India in search of the village of their ancestors and for shopping and/or spiritual purification. These journeys are often complex discoveries of both the real and the imaginary India, and are almost invariably linked to desires for purification and “proper” Indianness and “culture,” which, in their turn, are spawned by social mobility and ambition. The other side of this new fascination with India's past and its emerging power as a nation is an intense interest in Bollywood films and their songs, stars, and aesthetics.Less

Thomas Blom Hansen

Published in print: 2012-07-22

This chapter looks at the new economy of diasporic imagination that hit South Africa after 1994. It begins by examining a range of narratives of roots tourism whereby thousands of South African Indians each year travel to India in search of the village of their ancestors and for shopping and/or spiritual purification. These journeys are often complex discoveries of both the real and the imaginary India, and are almost invariably linked to desires for purification and “proper” Indianness and “culture,” which, in their turn, are spawned by social mobility and ambition. The other side of this new fascination with India's past and its emerging power as a nation is an intense interest in Bollywood films and their songs, stars, and aesthetics.

‘New Bollywood’ has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood ...
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‘New Bollywood’ has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood films just uninspired Hollywood rip-offs, or does their borrowing signal genuine innovation within the industry? Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this book reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the twenty-first century. Equipping readers with an alternative method of reading contemporary Indian cinema, the book takes Indian film studies beyond the standard theme of diaspora, and exposes a new decade of aesthetic experimentation and textual appropriation in mainstream Bombay cinema. A bold celebration of contemporary Bollywood texts, this book radically redefines Indian film and persuasively argues for its seriousness as a field of cinematic studies.Less

Bollywood and Postmodernism : Popular Indian Cinema in the 21st Century

Neelam Sidhar Wright

Published in print: 2015-07-01

‘New Bollywood’ has arrived, but its postmodern impulse often leaves film scholars reluctant to theorise its aesthetics. How do we define the style of a contemporary Bollywood film? Are Bollywood films just uninspired Hollywood rip-offs, or does their borrowing signal genuine innovation within the industry? Applying postmodern concepts and locating postmodern motifs in key commercial Hindi films, this book reveals how Indian cinema has changed in the twenty-first century. Equipping readers with an alternative method of reading contemporary Indian cinema, the book takes Indian film studies beyond the standard theme of diaspora, and exposes a new decade of aesthetic experimentation and textual appropriation in mainstream Bombay cinema. A bold celebration of contemporary Bollywood texts, this book radically redefines Indian film and persuasively argues for its seriousness as a field of cinematic studies.

This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans ...
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This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans (Desis), especially youth, engage with these Hindi language films with English subtitles on a number of levels. The chapter focuses on the circulation and consumption of Bollywood films in two locations in the South Asian diaspora: Silicon Valley, CA and Queens, NY. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic data of conversational exchanges, commentary during viewing, and personal narratives are presented to illustrate Bollywood's role in shaping linguistic processes of indexicality, bivalency, and identity. In these ways, the chapter analyzes how media and language use together shape style and identity in this Asian American community, as well as how this process varies between different locations of the South Asian diaspora.Less

Reel to Real : Desi Teens' Linguistic Engagements with Bollywood

Shalini Shankar

Published in print: 2009-01-01

This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans (Desis), especially youth, engage with these Hindi language films with English subtitles on a number of levels. The chapter focuses on the circulation and consumption of Bollywood films in two locations in the South Asian diaspora: Silicon Valley, CA and Queens, NY. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic data of conversational exchanges, commentary during viewing, and personal narratives are presented to illustrate Bollywood's role in shaping linguistic processes of indexicality, bivalency, and identity. In these ways, the chapter analyzes how media and language use together shape style and identity in this Asian American community, as well as how this process varies between different locations of the South Asian diaspora.

This book is part of a series which aims to explore the area of ‘screen music’. Volume topics include multimedia music, music and television, Hollywood film music, and the music of Bollywood cinema. ...
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This book is part of a series which aims to explore the area of ‘screen music’. Volume topics include multimedia music, music and television, Hollywood film music, and the music of Bollywood cinema. Music and other sound effects were central to a whole host of media forms throughout the twentieth century, either as background, accompaniment, or main driving force. Such interactions will continue to mutate in new directions with the widespread growth of digital technologies. Despite the expansion of research into the use of music and sound in film, the investigation of sonic interactions with other media forms has been a largely under-researched area. This book provides a study of how music and other sounds play a central part in our understandings and uses of a variety of communications media. It focuses on four areas of sound and music within broader multimedia forms — music videos, video game music, performance and presentation, and production and consumption — and addresses the centrality of such aural concerns within our everyday experiences.Less

Music, Sound and Multimedia : From the Live to the Virtual

Published in print: 2007-11-14

This book is part of a series which aims to explore the area of ‘screen music’. Volume topics include multimedia music, music and television, Hollywood film music, and the music of Bollywood cinema. Music and other sound effects were central to a whole host of media forms throughout the twentieth century, either as background, accompaniment, or main driving force. Such interactions will continue to mutate in new directions with the widespread growth of digital technologies. Despite the expansion of research into the use of music and sound in film, the investigation of sonic interactions with other media forms has been a largely under-researched area. This book provides a study of how music and other sounds play a central part in our understandings and uses of a variety of communications media. It focuses on four areas of sound and music within broader multimedia forms — music videos, video game music, performance and presentation, and production and consumption — and addresses the centrality of such aural concerns within our everyday experiences.

It is perhaps pertinent that this book ends with a critical reading of Mahesh Manjrekar's Vaastav (Reality, 2000). The dark, stifling atmosphere of the film belongs precisely to that underbelly of ...
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It is perhaps pertinent that this book ends with a critical reading of Mahesh Manjrekar's Vaastav (Reality, 2000). The dark, stifling atmosphere of the film belongs precisely to that underbelly of the city that is denied the heady exhale of the geo-televisual as informatic. Yet it is a world that is irresistibly besieged by the overall diagram of desire and value of which geo-televisual informatics is an advertising component. This book has been the story of the ideological and political underpinnings of the ways in which the Hindi film adjusted to a new dispensation of media, capital and political Hinduism roughly between 1991 and 2004. It has thus examined the emergence of a ‘Bollywood’ style in an environment of what it calls informatic or advertised modernisation. While doing so, the book has attempted to provide a lens for understanding not just the ‘Bollywood’ phenomenon, but why exactly economic liberalisation can actually bolster traditional, anti-modern authorities in third world situations instead of eroding them.Less

Epilogue

Anustup Basu

Published in print: 2010-09-13

It is perhaps pertinent that this book ends with a critical reading of Mahesh Manjrekar's Vaastav (Reality, 2000). The dark, stifling atmosphere of the film belongs precisely to that underbelly of the city that is denied the heady exhale of the geo-televisual as informatic. Yet it is a world that is irresistibly besieged by the overall diagram of desire and value of which geo-televisual informatics is an advertising component. This book has been the story of the ideological and political underpinnings of the ways in which the Hindi film adjusted to a new dispensation of media, capital and political Hinduism roughly between 1991 and 2004. It has thus examined the emergence of a ‘Bollywood’ style in an environment of what it calls informatic or advertised modernisation. While doing so, the book has attempted to provide a lens for understanding not just the ‘Bollywood’ phenomenon, but why exactly economic liberalisation can actually bolster traditional, anti-modern authorities in third world situations instead of eroding them.

While the recent blockbuster Krrish (2006) was initially promoted as “India’s First Super Hero,” the film is actually part of a long history of attempts to engage with the superhero genre in Indian ...
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While the recent blockbuster Krrish (2006) was initially promoted as “India’s First Super Hero,” the film is actually part of a long history of attempts to engage with the superhero genre in Indian cinema. Utilising Yuri Lotman’s model of cultural exchange, this chapter traces five distinct stages in this history from the early use of imported characters in titles such as Return of Mr. Superman (1960) through to the transnational influence of contemporary Indian superheroes such as Krrish and Ra.One (2011). Moving beyond simplistic formulations that see Indian superheroes as purely imitative of Western models, this chapter instead positions the Indian superhero as part of a transnational dialogue that has a number of implications for our understanding of globalization more broadly.Less

Iain Robert Smith

Published in print: 2015-06-01

While the recent blockbuster Krrish (2006) was initially promoted as “India’s First Super Hero,” the film is actually part of a long history of attempts to engage with the superhero genre in Indian cinema. Utilising Yuri Lotman’s model of cultural exchange, this chapter traces five distinct stages in this history from the early use of imported characters in titles such as Return of Mr. Superman (1960) through to the transnational influence of contemporary Indian superheroes such as Krrish and Ra.One (2011). Moving beyond simplistic formulations that see Indian superheroes as purely imitative of Western models, this chapter instead positions the Indian superhero as part of a transnational dialogue that has a number of implications for our understanding of globalization more broadly.

The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor ...
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The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as “the Death Question” – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the “afterlife” of the self.Less

The Gothic and Death

Published in print: 2017-03-27

The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as “the Death Question” – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the “afterlife” of the self.

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ...
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In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. This book seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, this book is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.Less

Love in Africa

Published in print: 2009-06-15

In recent years, scholarly interest in love has flourished. Historians have addressed the rise of romantic love and marriage in Europe and the United States, while anthropologists have explored the ways globalization has reshaped local ideas about those same topics. Yet, love in Africa has been peculiarly ignored, resulting in a serious lack of understanding about this vital element of social life—a glaring omission given the intense focus on sexuality in Africa in the wake of HIV/AIDS. This book seeks both to understand this failure to consider love and to begin to correct it. In a substantive introduction and eight essays that examine a variety of countries and range in time from the 1930s to the present, the contributors collectively argue for the importance of paying attention to the many different cultural and historical strands that constitute love in Africa. Covering such diverse topics as the reception of Bollywood movies in 1950s Zanzibar, the effects of a Mexican telenovela on young people's ideas about courtship in Niger, the models of romance promoted by South African and Kenyan magazines, and the complex relationship between love and money in Madagascar and South Africa, this book is a vivid and compelling look at love's role in African society.

This book analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multimedia cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, ...
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This book analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multimedia cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, the book explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, the book is a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the United States, this book offers empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, the book develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries—film, television, marketing, and digital media. The book's transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.Less

From Bombay to Bollywood : The Making of a Global Media Industry

Aswin Punathambekar

Published in print: 2013-07-24

This book analyzes the transformation of the national film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multimedia cultural enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, the book explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora, circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media professionals, the book is a timely analysis of how a media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as its scale of operations. Based on extensive field research in India and the United States, this book offers empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of how the imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a single medium, the book develops a comparative and integrated approach that examines four different but interrelated media industries—film, television, marketing, and digital media. The book's transnational approach to understanding the formation of Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.

This book examines changes in Bollywood's film production during the twenty-first century, and particularly after its economic liberalisation, giving rise to a ‘New Bollywood’. It shows how the ...
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This book examines changes in Bollywood's film production during the twenty-first century, and particularly after its economic liberalisation, giving rise to a ‘New Bollywood’. It shows how the Indian cinema has acquired evidently postmodern qualities and explains what postmodernism means in the context of Bollywood cinema. It also considers what postmodernism tells us about the change and function of Bollywood film language after the twenty-first century. The book describes Bollywood's ‘postmodern turn’ as a form of transformation that reworks or revisits previous aesthetic trends in order to produce a radically different aesthetic. ‘New Bollywood’ refers to contemporary films characterised by a strong postmodern aesthetic style which was not as present in the 1990s. This introductory chapter discusses the meaning of ‘contemporary Bollywood’, postmodernism as a means of reading and interpreting films, and the structure of the book.Less

Introduction: The Bollywood Eclipse

Neelam Sidhar Wright

Published in print: 2015-07-01

This book examines changes in Bollywood's film production during the twenty-first century, and particularly after its economic liberalisation, giving rise to a ‘New Bollywood’. It shows how the Indian cinema has acquired evidently postmodern qualities and explains what postmodernism means in the context of Bollywood cinema. It also considers what postmodernism tells us about the change and function of Bollywood film language after the twenty-first century. The book describes Bollywood's ‘postmodern turn’ as a form of transformation that reworks or revisits previous aesthetic trends in order to produce a radically different aesthetic. ‘New Bollywood’ refers to contemporary films characterised by a strong postmodern aesthetic style which was not as present in the 1990s. This introductory chapter discusses the meaning of ‘contemporary Bollywood’, postmodernism as a means of reading and interpreting films, and the structure of the book.